MeriCity respects the right of all persons to privacy. This Privacy Policy describes how and when we collect, use and share your information across Our website at ‘www.MeriCity.com’, SMS, APIs, email notifications, applications, buttons, widgets, ads, commerce services, and our other covered services (if any) that link to these mc-privacy (collectively, the “Services”), and from our partners and other third parties. While using any of our Services you consent to the collection, transfer, storage, disclosure, and use of your information as described in this Privacy Policy. This includes any information you choose to provide that is deemed sensitive under the applicable law. When this policy mentions “We” or “us” or “Our” or “MeriCity”, it refers to the controller of your information under this policy. Your information is controlled by MeriCity Solutions Private Limited. Despite this, you alone control and are responsible for the posting of information/complaint and other content you submit through the Services, as provided in the mc-privacy of Service and MeriCity Rules. You authorize us to transfer, store, and use your information in India, and/or other countries for storage, processing and use by MeriCity and its affiliates; and to send the information/ content to the Authorities.
Information Collection and Use:
Basic Account Information:
If you choose to create a MeriCity account, you must provide us with some personal information, such as your real name, username, password, email address and phone number. You cannot create and manage multiple MeriCity accounts. Some of our product features, such as searching and viewing Complaints and the content thereto, charts etc. do not require you to create an account.
Contact Information:
You may use your contact information, such as your email address and phone number, to customize your account or enable certain account features, for example, for login verification, or Complaint status and disposal. You understand and agree by provide us with your phone number that you may receive text messages to that number from us. We may use your contact information to send you information about our Services, to market to you, to help prevent spam, fraud, or abuse, and to help others find your account, including through thirdparty services and client applications. You may use your settings for email and mobile notifications to control notifications you receive from MeriCity. You may also unsubscribe from a notification by following the instructions contained within the notification or the instructions on our website.
The Service Content, Captured Content and other Public Information:
MeriCity is primarily designed to help you post, transmit, distribute, upload, or otherwise disseminate through the Service the complaint/ information to the appropriate Authority and to bring the same to the notice of other people. MeriCity also allows you to post, transmit, distribute, upload, or otherwise disseminate through the Service the information, content & review regarding various public places, restaurants, hospitals, stores, shopping malls and/or other public amenities available in the City or Cities. Most of the Content you provide us through MeriCity is the Content you are asking us to make public. You may provide us with profile information to make it available as per this Policy, such as a short biography, your location, your website, date of birth, or a profile picture. Additionally, your public information includes the video, photo, and audio footage (collectively “Captured Content”) submitted, the complaint and/or information posted along with your location information collected using your devices’ Global Positioning System Functionality (collectively “Content”); the metadata provided with the Content, such as when you posted the Content; information about your account, such as creation time, language and state. MeriCity transmit and/or send the Content to the appropriate authority on a specific schedule. MeriCity instantly disseminates your Content to a wide range of users, the Authorities, customers, and services, including search engines, developers, and publishers that integrate MeriCity content into their services, and organizations such as Governments, universities, public health agencies, and market research firms that analyze the information for insights, policy making decisions, budget and resource allocation. When you post or upload the Captured Content and/or the Content via the Services, you should think carefully about what you are posting or uploading. We may use this information to make inferences, like what topics you may be interested in. Our default is almost always to make the information you provide through the Services public for as long as you do not delete it.
Our policy is to protect the identity of the victims of Sexual Offences and other related offences. Except the caption of the complaint, all the contents like Graphic Content and the complaint pertaining to crime against woman and/or child may not be displayed or shown to anyone, and only the Reporting User or the Authority having expressly granted rights to access it may see them. Only the appropriate Authority User may see such Contents along with the details of the Reporting User. If you have casted your vote in the favour of some Complaint requiring urgent attention of the Authority, your username, time of voting and location of the city will be displayed. In case of medical emergency, your details of account and the information i.e. the kind of emergency and/or the Captured Content you choose to submit will be sent to Hospital and/or The Authority User you chose for the medical treatment. In case of Woman-User and in the situation of some emergency, the Woman-User may send the information/ content to two email address provided by the Women-User. The email will contain the information the Reporting-Woman User provide along with her location information collected using devices’ Global Positioning System Functionality, or the captured content and the posting time, and complete details of the User.
The Service Content or Capture Content or public information will be subject to the MeriCity Rules. You can change the language, state and time zone associated with your account at any time using your account settings.
Direct Messages and Non-public Communication:
We provide certain features that allow you –the Authority User to communicate more privately to the Reporting Users. For example, you can use Direct Messages to have private conversations with the Reporting users.
Location Information:
You may provide us the location of your residence in your profile. We may also receive information about your location. For example, you may publish the Content with your location information collected using your devices’ Global Positioning System Functionality. We may also determine location by using other data from your device, such as precise location information from GPS, information about wireless networks or cell towers near your mobile device, or your IP address. We may use and store information about your location to provide features of our Services and to improve and customize the Services, for example, with more relevant content like local trends, stories, ads, and suggestions for people to follow.
Links:
We may keep track of how you interact with links across our Services, including our email notifications, third-party services, and client applications, by redirecting clicks or through other means. We do this to help improve our Services, to provide more relevant advertising, and to be able to share aggregate click statistics such as how many times a particular link was clicked on.
Cookies:
Like many websites, we use cookies and similar technologies to collect additional website usage data and to improve our Services, but we do not require cookies for many parts of our Services such as searching and looking at the complaint data, statistics etc. A cookie is a small data file that is transferred to your computer or mobile device. We may use both session cookies and persistent cookies to better understand how you interact with our Services, to monitor aggregate usage by our users and web traffic routing on our Services, and to customize and improve our Services. Although most web browsers automatically accept cookies, some browsers’ settings can be modified to decline cookies or alert you when a website is attempting to place a cookie on your computer. However, some Services may not function properly if you disable cookies. We honor the Do Not Track browser option to give you control over how your website visits are used to personalize your MeriCity experience and ads.
Using Our Service:
We receive information when you interact with our Services, even if you have not created an account (“Log Data”). For example, when you visit our websites, sign into our Services, interact with our email notifications, use your account to authenticate to a third-party website, application, or service, or visit a third-party website, application, or service that includes a MeriCity button or widget, we may receive information about you. This Log Data may include your IP address, browser type, operating system, the referring web page, pages visited, location, your mobile carrier, device information (including device and application IDs), search mc-privacy, or cookie information. We also receive Log Data when you click on, view or interact with links on our Services, including links to third-party applications, such as when you choose to install another application through MeriCity. We use Log Data to make inferences, like what topics you may be interested in, and to customize the content we show you, including ads. We keep Log Data as needed for the purposes described in this Privacy Policy. We will either delete Log Data or remove any common account identifiers, such as your username, full IP address, email address, or phone number, after a maximum prescribed under the Laws, if not sooner as provided below for Widget Data.
Widget Data:
We may tailor the Services for you based on your visits to third-party websites that integrate MeriCity buttons or widgets. When these websites first load our buttons or widgets for display, we receive Log Data that includes the web page you visited and a cookie that identifies your browser (“Widget Data”). After a maximum prescribed period under the laws, we start the process of deleting, deidentifying, or aggregating Widget Data, which is usually instantaneous but in some cases may take up to a week. We may use Widget Data to tailor content for you, such as suggestions for other third-party websites/services and other content you may be interested in. Tailored content is stored separately from other Widget Data such as page-visit information.
Advertising:
Our Services are supported by advertising. We may use the information described in this Privacy Policy to help make our advertising more relevant to you, to measure its effectiveness and to help recognize your devices to serve you ads on and off of MeriCity. For example, when you interact with content in the MeriCity for Android app, we may show content (including ads) about those same topics when you use MeriCity on the web. We do not use the content you share privately in Direct Messages to serve you ads. MeriCity prohibits advertisers from targeting ads based on categories we consider sensitive, such as race, religion, politics, sex life, or health.
Commerce Services:
You may provide your payment information, including your credit or debit card number, card expiration date, CVV code, and billing address (collectively, “Payment Information”), along with your shipping address, to complete a commerce transaction through our Services. To facilitate future purchases, we store your Payment Information (excluding CVV code) and shipping address, which you can remove from your account at any time using your account settings. We consider your Payment Information and shipping address private and do not make such information public. To facilitate order fulfillment, we collect and store information created by your purchases made through our Services (“Transaction Data”). Transaction Data may include the merchant’s name and the date, time, and amount of the transaction.
Third-Party and Affiliates:
We may receive information about you from third parties, partners (including ad partners), or our corporate affiliates. Our ad partners and affiliates may share information with us such as a browser cookie ID, mobile device ID, or cryptographic hash of a common account identifier (such as an email address), as well as demographic or interest data and content viewed or actions taken on a website or app. Our ad partners, particularly our advertisers, may enable us to collect similar information directly from their website or app by integrating our advertising technology.
Information Sharing and Disclosure:
User Content or Direction:We may share or disclose your information at your direction, such as when you authorize a third-party web client or application to access your account or when you direct us to share your feedback with a business.
Our policy is to protect the identity of the victims of Sexual Offences and other related offences. Except the caption of the complaint, all the contents like Graphic Content and the complaint pertaining to crime against woman and/or child may not be displayed or shown to anyone, and only the Reporting User or the Authority having expressly granted rights to access it may see them. The Service Content or Capture Content or public information will be subject to the MeriCity Rules.
Service Providers: We engage service providers to perform functions and provide services to us in the India, and/or other countries. For example, we use a variety of third-party services to help provide our Services, such as hosting our various blogs and wikis, and to help us understand and improve the use of our Services, such as Google Analytics. We may share your private personal information with such service providers subject to obligations consistent with this Privacy Policy and any other appropriate confidentiality and security measures, and on the condition that the third parties use your private personal data only on our behalf and pursuant to our instructions. We share your Payment Information with payment services providers to process payments; prevent, detect and investigate fraud or other prohibited activities; facilitate dispute resolution such as chargebacks or refunds; and for other purposes associated with the acceptance of credit or debit cards.
Commerce Transaction: If you make a payment as part of a commerce transaction through our Services, we may provide the seller, commerce provider, marketplace, or charity with your name, email address, shipping address, Payment Information and Transaction Data to facilitate payment processing, order fulfillment, and dispute resolution (including payment and shipping disputes) and to help prevent, detect, and investigate fraud or other prohibited activities. Please refer to these third parties’ privacy policies for information about their privacy practices.
Law and Harm: Notwithstanding anything to the contrary in this Privacy Policy, we may preserve or disclose your information if we believe that it is reasonably necessary to comply with a law, regulation, legal process, or governmental request; to protect the safety of any person; to address fraud, security or technical issues; or to protect our or our users’ rights or property. However, nothing in this Privacy Policy is intended to limit any legal defenses or objections that you may have to a third party’s, including a government’s, request to disclose your information.
Business Transfers and Affiliates: In the event that we are involved in a bankruptcy, merger, acquisition, reorganization or sale of assets, your information may be sold or transferred as part of that transaction. This Privacy Policy will apply to your information as transferred to the new entity. We may also disclose information about you to our corporate affiliates in order to help provide, understand, and improve our Services and our affiliates’ services, including the delivery of ads.
Public or Non-Personal Information: We may share or disclose your public, aggregated or otherwise non-personal information, such as your public username, your votes and any other information that you choose to be made public and subject to the MeriCity Rules, or reports to advertisers about unique users who saw or clicked on their ads.
Accessing and Modifying Your Personal Information:
If you are a registered user of our Services, we provide you with tools and account settings to access, correct, delete, or modify the personal information you provided to us and associated with your account.
You can also deactivate your MeriCity account. If you follow the instructions here, your account will be deactivated. In case of deactivation or termination of your Services for any reasons, your Content, on either website or Application, will still be viewed by other Users including the appropriate Authority User; the appropriate Authority-User can still discard, or can process, act upon the Complaint/information and/or close it.
Keep in mind that search engines and other third parties may still retain copies of your public information, like your user profile information and the Content, even after you have deleted the information from the MeriCity Services or deactivated your account.
Changes to this Policy:
We may revise this Privacy Policy from time to time. The most current version of the policy will govern our use of your information and will always be at www.MeriCity.com/privacypolicy If we make a change to this policy that, in our sole discretion, is material, we will notify you via an email to the email address associated with your account. By continuing to access or use the Services after those changes become effective, you agree to be bound by the revised Privacy Policy.
Effective Date :
May 8,2017
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